The devil and Dr. Carson

Many Americans no doubt were mystified during the second night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, when Dr. Ben Carson — a candidate for president on the Republican ticket, oh so long ago — started talking about Lucifer. No doubt many convention attendees and folks watching on TV were mystified.

The background: Hillary Clinton is known to have been taken with the ideas of Saul Alinsky, whose 1971 polemic “Rules for Radicals” is often seen as a textbook for progressive change. In what some call a dedication — the fact-checking website www.snopes.com calls it “three epigraphs on an introductory page” — Alinsky wrote this:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.

(T)his much we can certainly say: Saul Alinsky clearly had an influence on the future Democratic nominee for president.

And further, we must add that Alinsky’s influence was not only on the current Democratic nominee. He impacted the previous nominee as well. As noted, a young man named Barack Obama would read and teach Alinsky’s tactics during his community-organizing days in Chicago.

Alinsky’s influence on the Democratic Party today is so pronounced that his son, David, boasted eight years ago that the “Democratic campaign in 2008 … is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky.” He beamed: “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style.”

The 2016 Democratic National Convention likewise will owe something to Saul Alinsky. Hillary and crew may not give an open acknowledgment to Lucifer, but they ought to give an admiring nod to the lingering presence of Saul Alinsky.

I sympathize with Dr. Carson on one level: liberals tend to view evil in clinical rather than spiritual terms. When people do bad things, it’s because they suffered abuse as children, or were exposed to substances that affected their thought processes. Liberals reject the idea of evil in the hearts of human beings — all the way up to and including Adolf Hitler, whose difficult childhood and adolescence, followed by his horrendous experiences during World War I, easily could explain the rage, violence, megalomania and sociopathy that manifested themselves in adulthood. It’s an understandable impulse. If someone or some movement is evil, all you can do is destroy it or lock it up. If it’s viewed clinically, it can be cured with some combination of kindness, drug therapy and psychiatry. Nobody needs to get hurt.

Lucifer, however, is the embodiment of evil. He can’t be cured or persuaded to behave differently. Whether he’s a metaphor, a physical individual (i.e., space alien) or a literal, immortal being, as described in the Bible, he thrives on harm coming to others. For him, what seems evil to us is good. He represents an evil that can’t be destroyed or cured. It only can be fought, forever, at enormous personal and social cost. I can see where liberals and others might see this conflict as so daunting, they pretend it simply doesn’t exist — and can be explained away by bad chemicals and worse parents. So a passing reference to the Prince of Darkness may seem harmless to a secularist like Clinton, but leaves a devout Christian like Ben Carson horrified.

It’s therefore not at all surprising that someone with Dr. Carson’s sensibilities would find the “epigraph” very disturbing, especially in the context of what may be an impending presidency. The worst that can be said of his speech was that he assumed knowledge most of his listeners didn’t possess, and therefore left them more confused than disturbed by the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration.